


Universe Pie

by EverythinggStayss



Category: Original Fiction - Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Existentialism, Friendship, Gen, Nihilism, Running Away, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, coming home, could be read as romance if you want ig, high school setting, onism, or more accurately, soft, waxing poetic about the universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-23 22:10:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19710457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EverythinggStayss/pseuds/EverythinggStayss
Summary: There’s a tap on my shoulder. I turn, and it’s her. Whatever adolescent chatter was filling the linoleum halls of my high school fades away as she flings herself around my shoulders. For a second, I can’t move, barely receptive to the pressure of her hug. It’s her.It’s Ida, my Official best friend, my platonic soulmate. Who I’ve known for half my lifetime. Who loves movies and dogs and despises celery.Who’s been missing for four months.





	Universe Pie

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve never posted original work but ah
> 
> Give it a chance pls :)

There’s a tap on my shoulder. I turn, and it’s _her_. Whatever adolescent chatter was filling the linoleum halls of my high school fades away as she flings herself around my shoulders. For a second, I can’t move, barely receptive to the pressure of her hug. _It’s her._

It’s Ida, my Official best friend, my platonic soulmate. Who I’ve known for half my lifetime. Who loves movies and dogs and despises celery. Who’s been missing for four months.

It was October when I’d seen her last. The days were on the cusp of Halloween, so the air was filled with the anticipation of costumes and parties and the best kind of bad decisions.

It had been a normal day, all things considered. We had classes. We got homework. We ate lunch. We had more classes. We got more homework. Then it was time to go home. Ida had a job bagging groceries at the quikmart down the road from our school, so I waved goodbye as we parted ways, just like every weekday afternoon before.

Then I never saw her again.

At 11 pm I get a call from a number I vaguely recognize as her mother’s. Ms. Yahn frantically asked me if I’d seen Ida. I hadn’t.

The next day I learn that neither had anyone else. Her boss and coworkers had told Ms. Yahn that she never showed up for her shift. None of Ida’s other friends had seen a trace of her.

In the following week I was quizzed by Ms. Yahn, the teachers of my school, the police, my moms, the police again, everyone at school, and the local news network.

She had completely dropped off the grid. Her room had been left as it always was-messy. Upon further investigation, a bag, money, and some clothes were missing. A runaway, the police declared.

Ida wasn’t stupid, so they couldn’t pick up traces of her phone signal, though it was assumed she took it with her. And if the 253 calls her family placed were going anywhere, she either lost it or was intentionally not using it.

I was distraught. She was gone, with no forwarding address. She was 17 and alone who knows where.

And now she’s _here_.

The police found her four months later, six towns over, eating a sub outside some shitty diner at nine in the morning. They drove her home. I was informed via Ms. Yahn’s rather curt text that she would be safe at home for the rest of the week, settling in.

Settling in, in this case, no doubt meant family bonding, police inquiry, recuperating from whatever shit she’d been through, psychiatric assessment, and burning through Ida’s Netflix queue.

She must’ve finished the new season of her favourite sitcom because before me, under the awful fluorescent light of academic wasteland, she stood.

It’s strange to see her inhabit her old body again. She still wears her shirts the same way and her backpack is the same one she’s always had, but her hair is longer, her legs more scarred, and her presence all the more foreign.

I think some people are just meant to be more memorable, more of an experience. Talking to her had always been like courting stardust, but I’d never felt the distant heat of her light up close like this before. She’s on fire, and she leaves embers where she walks.

There’s something almost sheepish in the way she’s standing. Some of her other friends spot her and there’s squealing and hugs and shock and tears. I am silent and still.

The bell rings, and I want to cry. What a terrible mundanity.

Ida takes books out of her bag, and I distantly wonder if she did the homework she was assigned, that October night. (She didn’t. She never would.)

She walks to class, and whispers follow her. Ida never had much of a footprint in our school’s social standings, but a mysterious disappearance is an effective way to spike mild interest in your classmates. There’s a small set of teachers down the hall, watching her carefully, and I know then that they’ve been asked to check on her. To determine if she’s still a flight risk.

I can’t sit still in my classes. My thoughts drift and crash in my head, and they all look like her laugh and sound like her smile and taste like her name.

It’s 3 before I know it, and school is over for the day. She’s waiting at my locker, like I somehow knew she would be.

“Can we talk?” she asks, delicately.

_Of fucking course we can talk!! We have to talk!! Where were you?!?_

”Yeah, sure.”

My feet follow hers out of the building without consideration. We wander in heavy silence until we’re in a nearby park.

She perches on a swing.

_are you okay?? where did you go? were you safe?? where did you sleep? what did you eat? do you know what you put everyone through?? ????????????!!????? ???!!!!????,,,.???????????!???????!!!!???? ,,,;;,,,,,,?,?,,,,,_

My racing thoughts have homogenized into static, and I force out the one thing I need to know.

“Why?”

She sits in contemplation, head slightly tilted, as if I had asked her what she wanted for dinner, and not WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY W H Y W H Y

She speaks, after a bit, and I almost start.

“Have you ever heard of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows?”

“Wha-?”

“It’s a collection of made up words, well, all words are made up, but these ones more recently, to describe deep and strange feelings we don’t know how to name.

There’s one I really like called “onism.” The awful feeling of being stuck in only one body, of being only able to be in one small space at a time.

There’s other good words I can’t remember, too. They mostly all boil down to this: the world is wide and we are stupidly small.”

She’s so serene, so Manic Pixie Dream Girl, so unaffected, that I almost slap her.

_After all she’s put everyone through?? She wants to act cute???_

_“_ I don’tsee what this has to do with you running away for no goddamn reason!”

Ida deflates slightly. When she speaks again, she’s softer yet more raw, like she’s ripping the words out of her chest and leaving them exposed in the sunlight.

“Have you ever just gotten up and looked at the sky? It’s incredible. It’s like an arching dome of something like light, wrapping around everything you’ve ever known. And you know, logically, that sky is just air, and everything is filled by air, so in a way, sky is everything around you. You’re surrounded by sky. You’re part of it. But when you look at the sky, you don’t feel like part of anything. You are small and meaningless, a blip in the unending blues. The sky is bigger than your stupid puny human brain gets to comprehend.

And it gets bigger! Because outside of the big sphere that is our planet, there’s more big spheres, orbiting an even bigger sphere! And our solar system is nothing amidst our galaxy. And our galaxy is nothing amidst our universe. Our big and and ridiculous universe! We are so microscopic in our universe.

But that’s when it gets better- and worse too. Because inside our tiny microscopic bodies is a whole other universe! We are a macrocosm to the beings inside us. Do you ever just, _feel_ , your heart beating in your body and think about how your heart is made up of tissues made up of cells made up of atoms made up of subatomic particles? Spheres inside spheres inside spheres inside spheres.”

She gulps in air, seeming vaguely surprised by her own rush of words.

“Anyway. If you’ve ever just thought about any of that, sat there and realized how big and how little and how everything and how nothing we are, our slice-no, _crumb_ , of universe pie, then how _the_ _fuck_ do you get up the next morning to the sound of your alarm and go to school? How do you go to class and learn things that a group of people you’ll never meet decided was important? How do you work knowing that a meaningless grade number is what is going to determine the value that your macro/microcosm has in our world? How do you sit, stand, and eat at the command of a little metal bell? How do you do anything at all?

So I ran away. Because if nothing matters and everything matters then I’d rather go experience whatever fraction of the universe I can, instead of learning trig identities. That’s all.”

I don’t know what to say. She’s right, in a twisted sort of way. She’s wrong though, too. I think.

“I.. I guess that’s all fair...

You scared the shit out of everyone though. You scared me.”

“...”

“For months I thought of barely anything else. In a way, you became my universe.

I don’t know if everything is meaningless and society has no value. Maybe. But maybe, despite the garbage of broken systems in need of fixing, we still need it. Humans are social creatures, and creatures of habit, too. Maybe if the universe is too big and too small to handle on our own, that’s why we have each other.”

“...”

“Please don’t leave again. I need you. I think you need me, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> idk ya gorl gets very hashtag deep in the evenings and she had pent up energy and instead of working on her fic wips she made this. 
> 
> Kudos, comments, etc are all very very very appreciated 
> 
> Thanks for reading <3


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